41 bullets
I look at these maps, these visualizations of the institutionalization of terror, and I go back to the evening of February 4, 1999 to re-imagine a scene that has been seared into my mind for almost twenty years. Amadou Diallo, a twenty-three-year-old West African immigrant, is making his way back to his apartment in the Soundview section of the Bronx. Four plain-clothed white men are tailing him. They are members of the NYPD’s notorious Special Crimes Unit, recently expanded under the reign of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Diallo enters his doorway and reaches for his pocket. The entryway is dimly lit. Without flinching once, the officers let loose. 41 bullets. 19 of them hit Diallo, and he drops dead on his doorstep before the officers discover that it was a wallet in his hand, that he was unarmed, that he was not the rapist that they had profiled him as. None of these facts mattered anymore because what he was, was dead.
At the time of Diallo’s murder, I was a newly minted member of CAAAV (Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence, now CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities) serving on the Coalition Against Police Brutality and Racism (CAPBR), which was a joint effort by community-led groups to oppose the state-sanctioned violence that was a hallmark of both Giuliani and our city’s neoliberal transformation. We quickly joined the organized outrage that was orchestrated outside of City Hall during the days preceding the trial of the four officers involved. I was one of the members of CAAAV who stood alongside members of the Latino Workers Center to commit civil disobedience. I also agreed, as a member of CAPBR, to be ready to take action again the day after the verdict. So, when all four officers were declared innocent of all charges, we were among the first to pour out onto the streets and sit down, obstructing traffic just as the state had obstructed justice. The post-trial arrests were smaller and more militant, and also more aggressively handled by the NYPD. The message was clearly to cut off this moment in the ongoing struggles against police brutality, struggles that date back to the era of enslavement. It didn’t work, as the Black Lives Matter movement makes clear to this day.
As I reflect upon this in relation to Torn Apart/Separados, I am reminded also that a few short months before we became part of the city-wide movement around Diallo’s murder, CAPBR had organized to draw attention to a group of asylum seekers on hunger strike at the federal detention facility run by the privately owned Wackenhut Corrections Corporation (now GEO Group) outside of JFK airport. It was my first exposure to the seemingly arbitrary brutality of the U.S. immigration system, and the way in which its excesses are hidden in plain sight. Now, looking at these maps and thinking back to the organizing I was involved in nearly twenty years ago, I want to emphasize that Diallo was both Black and an immigrant, and that both matter.
Born in 1975 to a Fulbe trading family who were, at the time, in Liberia, he had lived in Togo, Thailand, Singapore, and Guinea before coming to the United States. In New York, he joined a cousin in working as a street peddler of video tapes, gloves, and socks near Union Square. His travels and his trade bore the marks of an intergenerational tradition of migration. His birth in Liberia, a country with a deep and constitutive relationship to slavery in the United States, also links his movements to those of the forced removals that engendered enslavement in the Americas. His own arrival in the United States was in 1996, was almost a century and a half after the legal abolition of chattel slavery in all cases except that of convicted felons.
The distinction is important to my point, because it has been the basis of the phenomenal expansion of the carceral state following the domestication and pacification of Black and Third World liberation movements in the middle of the last century. Key to this process is the emergence of felons as second-class citizens, with diminished rights, for life. They are outsiders, on the inside. 1996 is significant also because it was also the year that President Bill Clinton signed into law a series of immigration reforms that vastly expanded the scope of immigrant detention and deportation. The measures were in part modeled on the sentencing laws that had already fueled the phenomenal growth of the prison industrial complex (PIC), the specific ways that this rested on felonization in general, and the felonization of Black lives in particular. The 1996 laws also relied on the institutional infrastructure of the PIC to position immigrant detention as one of its fastest growing and most profitable divisions. Their enforcement drew from police and security forces deployed through anti-black racism and capitalist incapacitation. All of this was in place by the time of the attacks of September 11, 2001, and it is part of the larger complex that includes the Department of Homeland Security and ICE.
This makes me look at these maps and wonder, what would it look like if we put these alongside all of the prisons and jails in the US? What if we had a way of marking which of these facilities also held immigrant detainees, as so many local facilities outsource themselves in a manner not dissimilar to GEO Group? Could we ever find a way to also include all of us who are on parole and probation and thus rendered second class citizens? Those of us who have been deported? Our families and communities impacted by these forms of expulsion that blur the lines between what it means to be inside and outside of the United States? And if this seems like too much to put together on a map, how is it possible that we continue to live it as a reality?
Sujani Reddy is a writer, educator and organizer based in Jackson Heights, New York City.